"Bookworm" by Barbara Stokes

My sister Mary was (and still is) the bookworm in our family. Two years older than I am, she went through books like sand through a sieve. Her memory is prodigious, so she can recall a character, a bit of dialogue or plot point from a book we read when we were kids. Reading was as natural as breathing or eating.

In most families, stories are told about the kids and their funny sayings. In my family, one was repeated many times. This story comes from when I was not yet a reader, maybe four years old. We were all in the living room at our cottage; a place that never had a television set, a place for reading. My parents and my sister’s noses were all buried in their books.

“It’s not fair,” I declared to the silent room.

A long pause. Nobody wanted to stop reading. After a minute or two, my mother looked up.

“What’s not fair, sweetheart?”

“Everybody can read, except for me and Putzi.”

Putzi was our dog. I had no idea if she could read or not, but she couldn’t argue the point.

“Nobody wants to play with me.”

I didn’t want to die of boredom. Learning to read seemed a much more sensible alternative. I just didn't know how this reading thing worked. Until I did. 

I don’t even recall learning to read. It was as if one day it all made sense, all the letters had their innate character and when you lined them up in different ways they told you a story. Learning the correct pronunciations was sometimes a challenge. When I explained to my family that someone was a fanatic – they all laughed – it’s not fanatic but fanatic. English is hard and I feel sympathy for people learning it for the first time.

Once I learned, as we all know from experience, the world was an open book. (Sorry, couldn’t resist!) Everything my sister read, I read. Often we’d read together. Lying on the twin beds in our room we would devour books and sometimes read aloud in order to make fun of the characters and make up our own stories about them.

Swallows and Amazons, Treasure Island, Ivanhoe, Swiss Family Robinson, Nancy Drew, Five Children and It, The Railway Children, the Narnia books many times over … so many I can’t possibly pick a favourite, although I still love “The Little White Horse” by Elizabeth Goudge. All her books were wonderful and the titles themselves were brilliant and seductive; The Scent of Water, Pilgrim’s Inn, Linnets and Valerians. You could not resist taking them off the shelf. Now that I’ve learned publishers and editors choose titles, I don’t want to believe that was true back then. I want to give Elizabeth all the credit.

Our comprehensive reading list included the greats and not so greats, such as the Famous Five adventure series, which we read as comedy and set each other off in gales of giggles over Julian and his strong jaw.

Our local library was the Yorkville Branch, a handsome sandstone building with impressive stone steps that led to heavy wooden double doors. It sits next door to the historic Yorkville fire station a half block west of Yonge Street. It is the oldest library in the City of Toronto, built in 1907, thanks to the philanthropy of Andrew Carnegie. With its classic columns and weighty presence, it speaks with authority of the importance of knowledge and the value of the world it holds inside.

Growing up three blocks away, visits to the library were part of our regular schedule. Being part of the younger cohort, it was likely that the older girls (who were the majority on the street) brought us along with them as soon as they were allowed to cross Yonge Street on their own. Many of the girls had their first jobs at the library, and I’m not sure why my sister didn’t get a job there. She haunted the place, she should have been paid for it.

I can still conjure up the breathlessness when we climbed those steep steps, hand on the round metal railing, pushed through the heavy doors and filed into the welcoming silence. Inside was the magic key of the Dewey Decimal system and a world cloaked in the scent of dust, paper and bindings. Light streamed in through the tall windows. It was warm in winter and cool in summer.

Now I have a digital reader and download books. It is convenient, but not magical.

***

Barbara Stokes enjoys bringing memories to the surface and polishing them. Barbara writes short essays and poems and has had It’s Not Over Yet and Stones and Clouds published on the Quick Brown Fox blog. Barbara lives in Burlington, Ontario and is working on a crime thriller loosely based on something that really happened to someone in Saskatchewan.

See Brian Henry’s upcoming weekly writing classes, one-day workshops, and weekend retreats here. 

“It’s Not Over Yet” by Barbara Stokes

Late winter green promises made across cold hard ground

The murmur of a rumoured storm in some unknown distant land

Coming at us slowly, water lapping on the shore

Covering pebbled beaches erasing footprints left in sand

Surrounding us, soaking our summer sandals then faster in crashing waves

Waves with no water turning us over

Pulling us down to drown

Gasping for air struggling to reach a surface that is gone

Celebrations once marked our time in happy company 

Now ebb and fall away

Leaving no space for exhilaration

Only the breath of crackling agony

No joy in waking 

Every day the drum beat of anxiety follows our feet

Bathed in strange strangled quiet, the people retreat

Fox families capture city streets 

In the places we once loved to laugh and promenade, sirens never cease

Way back there, we listened to arias on balconies 

and the 7 p.m. call to arms

Banging pots and pans to herald frontline heroes

 Their last post our saving grace

A prayer for ancient sailors tossed into the sea 

They sink without a trace

We look away from the mirror that reflects our ugly face

That year with no hope

We asked, when will it be over

No, not now … no .. now?

That was the year with no hope

But now…?

We thought by now it would be over

***

Barbara Stokes wrote “It’s Not Over Yet” based on a prompt from Brian Henry’s online Creative Writing class. Her essay “Stones and Clouds” was published in February on the Quick Brown Fox blog. Barbara is now tackling a crime thriller loosely based on something that happened to someone in Saskatchewan. Barbara lives in Burlington, Ontario.

See Brian Henry’s upcoming weekly writing classes, one-day workshops, and weekend retreats here.

“Stones and Clouds” by Barbara Stokes

I watch clouds and I pick up stones. Some gather seashells by the seashore, but I’m hunting for the shiny wet pebbles left behind after the waves retreat. I take my time choosing a special one. Granite; shale; quartz; the occasional fossil. Smooth grey, deep black, sparkly white, blood red with an iron heart; one split evenly into two parts one black, one white. They may not look like much when you hold them in your hand but add water and their beauty shines like the diamonds they could have become.

My collection of stones bears no resemblance to a lapidary’s with its neatly printed labels and small compartments. It is piled in ceramic dishes on window sills, side tables and dressers. I find one occasionally in a pocket. Forgotten then rediscovered when the weather has changed and I’m searching for a suitable jacket. Ah, yes. I must have been wearing this raincoat when we hiked the trail at Nethy Bridge.

I have harvested stones from the rocky beach on the Firth of Cromarty in Scotland; from Rossport on the northern Lake Superior shoreline; from the entrance to the Jack Ladder trail carving through old growth forests in Temagami. 

Inside them, held in stasis in their veins, is the history of our universe. These crumbs shed from our earth’s core, these leftovers, are billions of years old. The younger ones only 570 million years or so, give or take 20 million. I pick them up from the ground free of charge.

I’m not much of a beach person. Lying prone under the unremitting glare of heat, sun and burning sand is not my idea of time well spent. A stormy day with dramatic clouds lifts my spirits. It is unpredictable and as such, far more interesting. 

A sand beach is what is left when stones are worn down to their shattered and powdered bones. Give me the northern hemisphere’s Precambrian crusts forced up from the ocean in a hiss of volcanic steam or built through eons of geologic time and pressure. Give me cool northern freshwater lakes left behind in the glacier’s retreat and let me inhale the mineral scent of joy.

Volutus cloud

This love of the hard stuff came to me late. I bombed out early in high school geography. A year later, under the guidance of a skinny Scot, (thank you Mr. McCully), I discovered, for the first time, the magnificent design of our world. I bombed out of earth sciences again at university when my sad lack of maths and sciences eroded my friable GPA. Even after this painful fissure, my love endured.

Earth and sky; oceans and deserts; weather systems and climate zones; drumlins and eskers; cirques and rills. I mapped the world wind systems, learned about igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic rocks, and named the different cloud formations that floated in the summer sky above us, as we lazed on the dock. 

Asperitus clouds

A part of science is naming things; the Latin name classifies and explains. Writing is naming too. How best to describe the cloud formations science has named; Cumulus, Cirrus, Stratus. Maybe you call them thunderheads, poached salmon or clouds from the Simpsons opening credits.  Cumulus is a heap. Stratus; a layer. Cirrus; a lock of horsehair. These clouds are the foundations on which all other clouds are built. 

This is poetry. Consider the new cloud names; Asperitus, Mammatus, and the latest and perhaps greatest, Volutus. These names don’t come from the Marvel universe but from our own marvellous universe. No wonder there is a Cloud Appreciation Society.

By its nature a cloud is fleeting. Like the atmosphere around us, clouds are motion, ever evolving. Like snowflakes, no two are ever the same. Clouds form and continually recycle the water from the oceans. I watch them as they change, but unlike my rocks, I can collect them only in my memories.

The stones in my collection will never change their form. Within the expanding measure of time, all the places where I found the stones will be changed. The water will rise and fall, future generations will excavate and build, sand thieves will come with shovels for the beaches. The stones will stay, stand and see it all.

***

Barbara (BC) Stokes spent her formative years writing words for other people to use. She's written mounds of ad copy, talk show banter, video scripts to launch hair-growth formula and speeches for politicians and well-perked executives. Over the past few years, she began writing seriously for fun, starting small with poems composed on the GO train. 

Now she enjoys putting words into her characters' mouths and watching them extricate themselves from threatening situations. Barbara is working on a novel inspired by something that happened to someone in Saskatchewan. She lives in the garden paradise of Burlington, Ontario with her husband; a teacher and artist.

See Brian Henry’s upcoming weekly writing classes, one-day workshops, and weekend retreats here.